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Yam, cultivate and cook

primitivetechnology.wordpress.com

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Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#81

Post by hexane360 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #49
albertfrostt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, aluminum is a really really new material for us. Wasn't really available until ~1950, and used to be more rare and valuable than gold.

How's that? Hard to refine? I did hear elsewhere that aluminium is one of the most common metals on the world, possibly even moreso than iron.

Aluminum forms very strong chemical bonds, so it's difficult to reduce it to its base form. Aluminum oxide is one of the most chemically stable materials there is. In WWII, being able to effectively refine aluminum (using lots of hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest) was one of the key economic factors that lead to an Allied victory.

For the entire commercial history of aluminum, it's been produced through molten-salt electrolysis (the Hall-Heroult process).

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#82

Post by loeg »

ekimekim wrote: post #42
loeg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I was commenting specifically on this claim: > This form of farming is a good way to get around the conventional farming practice of clearing trees to make fields. It's not a good form of farming, because it's both low density and expensive.

Depends on your criteria. If you only aim to feed a small group, it is significantly less cost to make a handful of enclosures than to clear a large amount of space for a field, even if the field is more efficient at scale.

My interest is feeding the world's entire, growing population.

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#83

Post by craftyguy »

loeg wrote: post #36
craftyguy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. using the same (or similarly 'primative') technique.

It doesn't scale up. That's why it isn't used.

False. Tribes in Papua New Guinea still grow food without industrial equipment, using technology that has changed little in the last tens of thousands of years.

No shit it doesn't scale to feed millions, but it scales in some way to feed more than one guy on youtube.

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#84

Post by wool_gather »

mljoe wrote: post #66
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #56

What a great idea, to feature this fellow's Primitive Technology blog (and his outstanding Youtube channel) here on a high tech news site. Fire making, clay pots, mud huts, stone axes, rope, hunting weapons -- these are what kept people alive for eons, and ironically in our modern high tech era, many if not most of these skills are largely forgotten by all but a few remaining primitive tribes and archivists like him.…

I think it is interesting to reflect on the idea that high technology builds on top of primitive technology. Just as he uses past tools to make more complex tools, every human era of technology builds upon the last. You could say primitive stone tools are in the recipe for developing an ICBM or a semiconductor if you go back far enough.

Brings to mind the famous bone club -> space station transition from the 2001 film.

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#85

Post by wool_gather »

craftyguy wrote: post #15

It would be interesting to see a way to scale up production to produce more than just a couple of meals.

Indeed. He has two other (earlier) videos of him building gardens, one with cassava, which he says is a very high-output food source. He also notes "A person could potentially be nearly self-sufficient from a small plot of sweet potatoes." Presumably it should scale for a small group, since they could share the work.

https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/plantin...

https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/sweet-p...

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#86

Post by beat »

Mumberthrax wrote: post #77
beat wrote: post #4

There's a lot of sophistication in "primitive" agriculture. Humans have always been as intelligent and ambitious as they are today; they just didn't always have today's tools. Yams always make me think of Gone with the Wind . The climax of Act III (not labeled as such, but stories are stories) is Scarlett O'Hara at her family's plantation. Yankee soldiers have come through and taken every scrap of food, but they didn…

Is that yam/africa thing actually true? A friend of mine linked me your comment, expressing disapproval. He said it "reads like some fever dream", and that hacker news is "supposed to be all software engineery". I don't see what the fuss is, but my experience with sites like this is mostly confined to reddit where 97% of comments are twaddle. edit: apparently sweet potatoes are from the new world: https://piedmontmas…

I'm basing it off a recent reading of The Cooking Gene, by Michael Twitty, which is ostensibly a history of African-American cooking in the South, but is in practice a very deep and well-researched history of the slave trade, by way of its food.

Doing a little more checking on what Twitty has to say (he's the authoritative source as far as I'm concerned), it looks like both interpretations are true:

"The yams of West Africa are not sweet potatoes, however sweet potatoes did fit well into cultures already used to relying on root crops. When Africans encounter sweet potatoes as enslaved people they utilized them in ways similar to tropical yams. Later, African varieties of sweet potato, like the Dahomey sweet potato, cross the Atlantic ocean and come to America."

https://afroculinaria.com/2016/10/05/crops-of-african-origin...

edit: One thing you learn from reading Twitty and other modern voices on the subject is just how extensively whitewashed even "scientific" history can be, and how much African contribution gets erased.

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#87

Post by beat »

debacle wrote: post #22
beat wrote: post #4

There's a lot of sophistication in "primitive" agriculture. Humans have always been as intelligent and ambitious as they are today; they just didn't always have today's tools. Yams always make me think of Gone with the Wind . The climax of Act III (not labeled as such, but stories are stories) is Scarlett O'Hara at her family's plantation. Yankee soldiers have come through and taken every scrap of food, but they didn…

Humans have always had the same/similar capacity for intelligence, but the modern world creates people with IQs significantly higher than the median would have been only 150 years ago.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Source?

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#88

Post by dvtv75 »

wool_gather wrote: post #84
mljoe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is interesting to reflect on the idea that high technology builds on top of primitive technology. Just as he uses past tools to make more complex tools, every human era of technology builds upon the last. You could say primitive stone tools are in the recipe for developing an ICBM or a semiconductor if you go back far enough.

Brings to mind the famous bone club -> space station transition from the 2001 film.

I think that's actually meant to be an orbital nuclear launcher, making the comparison even more appropriate.

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#89

Post by yarosv »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #55
lazysheepherd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If categorized very roughly, Primitive Technology would be the best in it's wide category for me. But I cannot say it is the best channel for me among Vsauce, Kurzgesgt, CrashCourse, and many others.

Yeah, there is an awful lot of really fantastic content produced on YouTube now. It's getting to the point where there is so much quality that discovery of it all is getting hard. In the spirit of your answer, I would say these other channels are also outstanding in their categories: Any of Brady Haran's (Numberphile/Sixty Symbols/Objectivity etc) Fully Charged Show (electric vehicles/renewable energy) Nick Carver (f…

Highly recommend Technology Connections for old tech.

Re: Yam, cultivate and cook

#90

Post by ivankirigin »

evmar wrote: post #11
ivankirigin wrote: post #6

This is probably my favorite youtube channel.

Buy him a coffee each time he releases a video: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2945881 (I have no particular connection to the channel or Patreon, I just like that I can support this channel because I also love it!)

I agree! I give him $10/month as long as he releases any video.
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